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First forecast calls for mild Amazon fire season in 2012

Forests in the Amazon Basin are expected to be less vulnerable to wildfires this year, according to the first forecast from a new fire severity model developed by university and NASA researchers.

Fire season across most of the Amazon rain forest typically begins in May, peaks in September and ends in January. The new model, which forecasts the fire season's severity from three to nine months in advance, calls for an average or below-average fire season this year within 10 regions spanning three countries: Bolivia, Brazil and Peru.

You're beautiful, Vesta

When UCLA's Christopher T. Russell looks at the images of the protoplanet Vesta produced by NASA's Dawn mission, he talks about beauty as much as he talks about science.

Unseen planet revealed by its gravity

More than a 150 years ago, before Neptune was ever sighted in the night sky, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier predicted the planet's existence based on small deviations in the motion of Uranus. In a paper published today in the journal Science online, a group of researchers led by Dr. David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute has inferred another unseen planet, this time orbiting a distant star, marking the first success of this technique outside the solar system.

New IBEX data show heliosphere's long-theorized bow shock does not exist

New results from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) reveal that the bow shock, widely accepted by researchers to precede the heliosphere as it plows through tenuous gas and dust from the galaxy does not exist.

Asteroid collision that spawned Vesta's asteroid family occurred more recently than thought

A team of researchers led by a NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) member based at Southwest Research Institute has discovered evidence that the giant impact crater Rheasilvia on Asteroid (4) Vesta was created in a collision that occurred only about 1 billion years ago, much more recently than previously thought. This result is based on the analysis of high-resolution images obtained with the Dawn spacecraft, which entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011.

Dawn reveals complexities of ancient asteroidal world

TEMPE, Ariz. – New findings from NASA's Dawn spacecraft lay the groundwork for the first geological overview of asteroid (4)Vesta and confirm the existence of not one but two giant impact basins in its southern hemisphere. The findings, published today in a set of Science papers, will help scientists better understand the early solar system and processes that occurred as it formed and evolved.

Smart phones are changing real world privacy settings

With endless applications, high-speed wireless Internet access, and free messaging services, smart phones have revolutionized the way we communicate. But at what cost? According to researchers at Tel Aviv University, the smart phone is challenging traditional conceptions of privacy, especially in the public sphere.

Free-floating planets in the Milky Way outnumber stars by factors of thousands

A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. Their findings are published online in the Springer journal Astrophysics and Space Science.

A&A special feature: Early results of the GREAT instrument onboard the SOFIA airborne observatory

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special feature devoted to the early results obtained during the first science flights of the airborne observatory SOFIA [1] with the GREAT far-infrared instrument [2]. We present 22 articles reporting on the technologies and the early astronomical results (including the first ever detection of new interstellar molecules).

Safer sex work spaces reduce violence and HIV risks for street-involved women

Safer indoor sex work spaces provide important and potentially life-saving benefits to sex workers including reduced exposure to violence and HIV and improved relationships with police, according to a study published by the Gender and Sexual Health Initiative of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) and the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Hubble observes a dwarf galaxy with a bright nebula

The starry mist streaking across this image obtained by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is the central part of the dwarf galaxy known as NGC 2366. The most obvious feature in this galaxy is a large nebula visible in the upper-right part of the image, an object listed just a few entries prior in the New General Catalogue as NGC 2363.

5-limbed brittle stars move bilaterally, like people

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — It appears that the brittle star, the humble, five-limbed dragnet of the seabed, moves very similarly to us.

Technology developed at Caltech measures Martian sand movement

PASADENA, Calif.—Last year, images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured sand dunes and ripples moving across the surface of Mars—observations that challenged previously held beliefs that there was not a lot of movement on the red planet's surface. Now, technology developed by a team at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has allowed scientists to measure these activities for the very first time.

The new method for data processing is outlined in an advance online publication of the journal Nature.

Climate scientists discover new weak point of the Antarctic ice sheet

Bremerhaven, 9 May 2012. The Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf fringing the Weddell Sea, Antarctica, may start to melt rapidly in this century and no longer act as a barrier for ice streams draining the Antarctic Ice Sheet. These predictions are made by climate researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association in the coming issue of the British science magazine "Nature".

Massive black holes halt star birth in distant galaxies

Astronomers, using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, have shown that the number of stars that form during the early lives of galaxies may be influenced by the massive black holes at their hearts. This helps explain the link between the size of the central bulges of galaxies and the mass of their central black holes.